Tag: Environment

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Elon Musk’s latest cause: Clean water for Flint

Water samples
Water samples from 2015 show a range of contamination in tap water from Flint, Mich. (FlintWaterStudy.org Photo)

Elon Musk didn’t even wait to get back from his Asia trip to start a new philanthropic campaign, this time to do something about the contaminated water supply in Flint, Mich.

The genesis of Musk’s involvement with the years-old Flint controversy echoes how he came to build a mini-submarine for the soccer-playing boys trapped in a Thai cave. It all started with a seemingly flip suggestion from comedy writer Cullen Crawford — plus an assist from Don A. Bailey, a Flint native who runs a blockchain consulting firm called Lab Mouse Security.

Bailey asked whether Musk, the billionaire CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, could help out with a water-testing campaign that he already had in the works. Musk immediately took up the cause, even though he had just delivered a mini-sub in Thailand and struck a deal to build a multimillion-dollar battery and car factory for Tesla in China. (That factory is likely to take years to get off the ground.)

See how the plans unfolded on Twitter.

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Study shows Antarctic ice loss is accelerating

Antarctic ice loss contribution to sea level
This chart shows the contribution to global sea levels due to changes in the mass balance of the Antarctic ice sheet between 1992 and 2017. (IMBIE / Planetary Visions Graphic)

An analysis of satellite data collected since 1992 suggests that ocean-driven melting has led to a tripling in the rate of ice loss from West Antarctica, from 53 billion to 159 billion metric tons per year.

The study was conducted by a group of researchers as part of the Ice Sheet Mass Balance Inter-comparison Exercise, or IMBIE, and published today in the journal Nature.

Estimated annual ice loss from the Antarctic Peninsula rose from 7 billion to 33 billion metric tons over the same 25-year period, due to ice shelf collapse.

East Antarctica’s ice sheet, however, is gaining mass at an average rate of 5 billion metric tons per year. The main factor behind that gain appears to be fluctuations in snowfall, researchers said.

The analysis suggests that 3 trillion tons’ worth of Antarctic ice losses have increased global sea levels by 7.6 mm (0.3 inches) since 1992, and that the increase is accelerating.

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Should space priorities be closer to home?

Moon and Earth
The moon passes right across Earth’s disk in an image captured on July 16, 2015, by the DSCOVR satellite from its observation point, a million miles out in space. DSCOVR’s Earth-observing mission had been threatened with cancellation, but NASA’s chief has signaled that it will continue. (NASA / NOAA Photo)

A newly released survey from Pew Research Center suggests that Americans still strongly support the space program, 60 years after NASA’s founding, but that they’re more interested in Earth science than exploration beyond Earth orbit.

That’s a turnabout from the broad strokes of White House policy, which has tried to downplay Earth observation and talk up the idea of sending Americans to the moon and Mars.

Despite that dissonance, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine welcomed the findings from Pew Research Center’s survey. When reporters told him that 63 percent said monitoring key parts of Earth’s climate system should be a top priority for NASA, Bridenstine reportedly answered, “Good.”

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What killed the birds? Scientists blame the Blob

Cassin's auklet
This Cassin’s auklet was found on Oregon’s Kiwanda Beach in 2014. (Patty Claussenius Photo / COASST)

Researchers have untangled the mystery behind a die-off that felled hundreds of thousands of tough seabirds known as Cassin’s auklets in 2014 and early 2015.

It’s not a simple answer: The proximate cause was starvation, but in a study published by Geophysical Research Letters, scientists report that the most likely root cause was an anomaly in Pacific Ocean circulation that came to be known as the Blob.

“This paper is super important for the scientific community because it nails the causality of a major die-off, which is rare,” senior author Julia Parrish, a marine scientist at the University of Washington and executive director of the Coastal Observation and Seabird Survey Team, said today in a news release.

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Antarctic drone duty gets a successful start

Seaglider at work
Pierre Dutrieux, an oceanographer from Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, works on one of the three Seaglider underwater drones deployed in West Antarctica. (Paul G. Allen Philanthropies Photo)

A scientific team supported by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen is reporting the successful deployment of a trio of undersea drones to monitor how climate change affects Antarctica’s ice sheets.

Now it’s up to the drones.

“We are so pleased with both the initial data collection and the unprecedented operational success of the mission thus far,” Spencer Reeder, director of climate and energy for Paul G. Allen Philanthropies, said in a news release. “It is hard to fathom that we have already witnessed multiple fully autonomous Seaglider forays of up to 140 kilometers round-trip under the ice shelf.”

The project is being conducted by researchers from the University of Washington and Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, with almost $2 million in funding from Allen.

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Do rockets blast away the ozone layer? Not yet…

Rocket exhaust
The dark exhaust seen streaming from the Merlin engines on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket that launched last October contains black carbon, which chemists say may play a role in ozone-depleting chemistry. (SpaceX via YouTube)

Thanks to Blue Origin, SpaceX and other space ventures, the skies could well be filled with rockets in years to come. But what will that do to the environment?

The short answer is, not that much right now. But as experts look to the years ahead, the answer gets as hazy as the air after a Falcon Heavy launch.

“Ten years ago, the amount of emissions was not great,” said Martin Ross, an engineer at the Aerospace Corp. whose research focuses on the effects of space systems on the stratosphere. “Today, the effect is still small, but it’s growing.”

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Why Walmart wants to patent robot bees

Robot bees
Robotic bees were the subject of a dystopian video four years ago. (Greenpeace via YouTube)

Robot bees have hit the big time.

In the 10 days since Walmart’s patent application for “systems and methods for pollinating crops via unmanned vehicles” came to light, the idea of building drones to do what bees do has gone viral.

The piece de resistance came on “Saturday Night Live” when Walmart’s concept got a mention on “Weekend Update” (around the 6:30 mark in this video clip).

“What is Walmart now?” comedian Colin Jost asked. “It’s a department store that became a grocery store, and a firearms dealer, and now they’re just building an army of robot bees?

“I miss the good old days, when Walmart was just a place where I saw my third-grade teacher punch a greeter on Black Friday,” he said.

CB Insights says the patent application is one of six that Walmart filed for farm automation applications, including crop monitoring, pest identification and pesticide spraying.

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Canada’s PM talks about pipelines with Science Guy

Justin Trudeau and Bill Nye
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau makes a point while Bill Nye looks on. (Global News via YouTube)

Canada’s highest-ranking science geek, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, shared a stage with Bill Nye the Science Guy at the University of Ottawa today — and shared a teachable moment on the subject of oil pipelines.

The event was a forum focusing on the Canadian federal government’s plans for investments in innovation, conducted in front of an audience of students and VIPs.

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Chinook salmon are shrinking – but why?

Chinook salmon
A Chinook salmon frequents Oregon’s McKenzie River. (Morgan Bond Photo via UW)

King salmon, the big fish that are famous in Alaska and the Pacific Northwest, are shrinking — not only in numbers, but in size as well.

A study published today in the journal Fish and Fisheries has found that the largest and oldest Chinook salmon (also known as king salmon or Oncorhynchus tshawytscha) have mostly disappeared along the West Coast.

“Chinook are known for being the largest Pacific salmon, and they are highly valued because they are so large,” lead author Jan Ohlberger, a research scientist in the UW’s School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences, said in a news release. “The largest fish are disappearing, and that affects subsistence and recreational fisheries that target these individuals.”

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TV show reveals turmoil behind solar-powered flight

Solar Impulse pilots and plane
Bertrand Piccard and Andre Borschberg shared the piloting duties on the single-seat Solar Impulse 2 airplane. (Niels Ackermann Photo / Rezo / Solar Impulse)

From the outside, it looked as if the Swiss-led Solar Impulse project smoothly soldiered through adversity as its solar-powered plane made a record-setting trip around the world in 2015 and 2016.

But the perspective was different when seen from the inside: The multimillion-dollar campaign nearly came crashing down when teammates debated whether to go ahead with a crucial Pacific crossing, even though the monitoring system for the autopilot wasn’t working right.

“The engineers were crying,” said Bertrand Piccard, the Swiss psychiatrist and adventurer who served as Solar Impulse’s co-founder, chairman and one of its pilots. “They were begging me to stop.”

The turmoil as well as the technology behind the globe-girdling, fuel-free odyssey are on full display in “The Impossible Flight,” a two-hour NOVA documentary premiering on PBS tonight.

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